You Look Nice Today: A Novel - Softcover

Bing, Stanley

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1582344396 ISBN 13: 9781582344393

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA, 2004

Synopsis

Robert Harbert, better known as Harb, is Executive Vice President in Charge of Total Quality. CaroleAnne Winter is the assistant who runs his life. But even Harb can't ignore that CaroleAnne's behavior is increasingly peculiar. At the same time, the vagaries of corporate power shift, and suddenly, both Harb and his Total Quality mandate are vulnerable. It's at this moment that CaroleAnne levels a stunning charge: that she has been the target of an organized campaign of sexual harassment from her first days at the company. The investigation she demands will reach to the highest levels of the corporation-and at its center, she insists, must be the greatest offender of all: Harb.

About this title

About the Author:

Stanley Bing's books include Throwing the Elephant, What Would Machiavelli Do?, and The Big Bing, as well as the novel Lloyd: What Happened, which is currently being developed for HBO. A columnist for Fortune, he also works for a huge multinational corporation whose identity is one of the worst-kept secrets in business.

From Publishers Weekly:

With this sardonic, entertaining legal thriller about a discrimination suit brought against a high-level corporate executive by his administrative assistant, Fortune columnist Bing tells a story of sexual harassment that's not about sex. Robert Harbert, or Harb, executive vice-president of Global Corporation's Total Quality department, falls for gorgeous uber-temp of indeterminate race CaroleAnne Winters, who saves the day on an important project. Recognizing her talent, Harb hires CaroleAnne full-time, but their cordial business relationship quickly grows too cozy: Harb gets CaroleAnne a corporate apartment to help her escape an abusive husband, gives her his aging car and brings her on business trips, which include boozy late nights that stop short of physical intimacy. CaroleAnne's behavior becomes erratic, though, when her spiritual side surfaces and she begins holding prayer meetings with a companion in the company's empty offices. Her tightly wound demeanor in the office is a harbinger of trouble to come, and when Harb tries to diffuse the tension between them by offering CaroleAnne a promotion to a different department, she refuses it, quits her job and sues Harb and the firm for sexual harassment and cultural insensitivity, to the tune of $150 million. The density of detail makes for slow going early in the novel, but the account of the civil trial that follows is a riveting and often hilarious account of CaroleAnne's fabrications and the corporate legal response, with Bing exposing the ways in which seemingly ordinary problems and human foibles take on new dimensions when they hit the legal system. Though the conclusion is a bit of a letdown, this is a great read and Bing's best take to date on how people cope with the political idiosyncrasies of the buttoned-down business world.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1582344396
• ISBN 13: 9781582344393
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304